Aparna Nancherla and Jo Firestone offer dubious advice about puberty

Puberty is a magical, confusing, terrifying time in a person’s life, and comedians Aparna Nancherla and Jo Firestone—the latter of whom is appearing at The Onion and The A.V. Club’s 26th Annual Comedy Festival in Chicago this June—want to make sure that young women everywhere are armed with all the information they need to survive this baffling biological ordeal. They share what they know and what they think they know in a hallucinatory new video called “Puberty Tips,” an offering from Refinery 29’s female-driven comedy YouTube channel, Riot. The video starts out as a pretty standard middle school biology class tutorial. Nancherla and Firestone let viewers know what to expect from the onset of adolescence. Hair will sprout. Hips will widen. That sort of thing. But then, things get strange. Nancherla, for instance, says that developing “cat-like reflexes” is normal, while “your feelings may develop their own web presence.” Firestone, meanwhile, says that puberty will slow the thought process and make meats taste different. Sounds legit.